I wasn’t shocked, but I was a little bewildered by the news this morning that United Airlines is going to charge overweight people double for their tickets. Here’s the guideline:
Under the rules outlined by United, passengers who are unable to fit into a single seat in the ticketed cabin; are unable to properly buckle the seatbelt using a single seatbelt extender; and/or are unable to put the seat’s armrests down when seated will be denied boarding unless they purchase an extra seat.
Apparently Americans have grown approximately 25 pounds since the 1960’s. Seat designs of today are basically the same as the 60’s. Many argue that the problem isn’t the size of the passenger but the size of the seat. I agree. Even though I’m pretty much where I “should” be weight-wise, I am over six feet tall and I never have enough room on a plane. My knees inevitably are shoved into the seat in front of me even before it is reclined! I have to spread my legs and sprawl into the space of my neighbors. Even my 35 inch arms have difficulty finding a place to rest. We are bigger. We are taller. We can discuss all the medical ethics involved because obesity increases health care and medical expenses, etc. But I want to talk about something else.
Our idea of what a body should look like is changing. This is not news. Look at artistic nudes down through the centuries and the body shapes are amazingly diverse. Even culturally, what is regarded as a beautiful body varies greatly. We know what the west believes is a beautiful body. Just look at the covers of our magazines or the stars of our movies. But it is more than just appearances. Now, health is associated with weight. So now, not only is what we consider beautiful pleasant to the eye, but necessary for health.
Let’s take, for example, Angelina Jolie. I choose her not because I personally think she is the hottest, but because apparently she is the conglomeration of all that is believed to be visibly perfect in a woman. She is considered by some of my friends, male and female, to be the pinnacle of what feminine beauty looks like. Then, let’s say that her figure is what the pinnacle of feminine health looks like. If a woman worked out as hard as she does for hours a day with a personal trainer and ate as she does, etc., then a woman would attain to roughly that kind of physical health and beauty. So now you have what is considered beautiful, plus what is considered healthy, and the two meld together. Soon, based on what I perceive is happening in such incidents as United Airline’s announcement, health and therefore ultimately beauty will be legislated.
We are becoming more and more tyrannical. It is the tyranny of health and beauty. It is the tyranny of consensus. It is the tyranny of popular. It is the tyranny of homogeneity. It is the tyranny of opinion substantiated by science. Science proves that a healthy body looks like so, and what happens to be so is what is already considered by popular opinion to be beautiful. Overweight people will be increasingly marginalized, ridiculed and finally persecuted. Same with those considered ugly. The whole Susan Boyle incident should embarrass us back to some kind of philosophical restructuring of our values, should it not? An ugly person with a voice? A miracle! She’s a freak, not only because she’s ugly, but because she’s ugly AND she can sing!
There must be communities that live contrary to this tyranny. We must protest against this by encouraging, nurturing and applauding diversity in every facet of human life and expression.
The painting is Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” that sold last year for $33 million… the highest fetched for any living artist.
Check out my tees HERE. I’m growing my inventory all the time. And check out my art HERE.
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I live in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, far away on the Atlantic shores of eastern Canada. So finding the supplies to do something like this linocut is difficult. It took me a while to find an art-supplier that sold the sheet of linoleum. Then I had to glue mount it onto a piece of plywood. I had to find the knives, which wasn’t as difficult. But I had to order the ink weeks ago from Daniel Smith’s in the States. It’s a beautiful deep black water-based ink. Wonderful to work with. I had to order the ink roller from them as well. I’ve had a difficult time choosing and finding the right paper. Finally, I settled on some recommendations and ordered a bunch of Arches 88 from a store on the West Coast. It is a nice paper. However, once in a while I try some very fine, almost tissue-like Japanese Mulberry paper. Delicate but very nice. So just the process of preparation to do this block print is incredibly challenging and time consuming.
Then there’s the actual creation of the image. I usually take Mondays off. So all day yesterday I carved the lino-block to create this image above. It is based on a photographed self-portrait of a gifted artist I met on flickr, Mimi Yoon. I call it “It’s You”. The image measures 6.5″ x 12″ (17cm x 30cm). Then Lisa came home from University and we had supper together. After supper I proceeded to ink the block and hand-pulled four artist’s proofs prints. Lisa asked what I was thinking about all day while I did that. I said “nothing”. When I work on a painting or sculpture or block-print or any art work, I’m completely absorbed in the creative process. It’s like fishing. I don’t think when I fish. I just fish. Not only is doing art a great stress reliever, but it is for me an act of meditation and contemplation. My mind is focused, and it is focused on something like Beauty.
Beauty. Many great thinkers down through history have even talked about a theology of Beauty, like the early fathers, medieval philosophers, Calvin, Barth, Balthasar, Simone Weil, and Heschel, among others. When I make art, I feel I am participating in creation. I am inspired by beauty to create beauty. Or, like some other artists, to make art that testifies to the manipulation of beauty or the destruction of it. One day my daughter and I sat to have coffee in the mall. As we watched countless people go by, we both agreed that everyone is beautiful in their own way. I find that as I get older and hopefully wiser, beauty is more important, all-embracing and eternal. I hope my art at least signals that.
You can buy an original signed edition of this print from my online art gallery.
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I read an interesting article on James Blunt, “The Blunt Life” written by Austin Scaggs for Rolling Stone Magazine (an October, 2007 issue). I was moved by it. But probably not in the way intended.
I don’t know why I was surprised, but this James Blunt guy that my daughter listens to singing those sweet heart-breaking love songs is quite the hedonist. I think he’s talented and I do like a couple of his songs. My favorite one is “Goodbye My Lover“. That one pulled my heart right out the first time I heard it. Sing that at my funeral Lisa. Anyway… back to my point. Blunt lives full-time on Ibiza, the Spanish isle in the Mediterranean, the world-renowned “bacchanalian paradise“, where “Ecstasy-fueled parties rage on well past sunrise“. Scaggs met up with Blunt and his friends already wired and getting ready for the night-long party, drinking vodka and beer. This pre-gaming was just the beginning of a “bizarre, drugged-up journey, which began hours ago with drinks“. Although the winters die down and Blunt turns more seriously to writing his songs, “the wild summers afford Blunt his other favorite pastime: partying like a depraved animal.” One of his songs, “1973“, was inspired while Blunt was still “shitfaced outside the legendary club Pacha“. The club they went to that night was wild and loud and things turned into a frenzy “as the drugs kicked in“. He’s considered “a pro in this manner of debauchery“. This party went on until 9am. Then they went back to a pool-side Cabana and the party lingered on until 2pm. Blunt enjoys “pushing the limits of his endurance (he hardly sleeps) and testing his psychological threshold (he enjoys his drugs).” Even though Spanish is the language spoken on Ibiza, he’s only learned one sentence, which is the Spanish for “Please wear a condom!” … “most likely through hearing it repeated so often“. Scaggs overhears Blunt tell someone, “Yes, in fact I am a sex-addict.” He plans on maybe slowing down in about five years, but for now he’s going to play hard. I found all this very, very interesting. Don’t you?
But what I found most interesting was a subtext I detected… I think. Something else is going on. I didn’t realize this, but the song which made Blunt rich and famous, “Beautiful“, is actually written about an experience he had where he met an old girlfriend on a bus, and it tore his heart out. Scaggs noticed a photo of a stunningly beautiful young woman on Blunt’s mantel. Scaggs asked Blunt who it was. “An ex“, Blunt responded. But Scaggs finds out it was her… the “Beautiful” girl. Blunt couldn’t seem to talk about it. “It obviously affected me. It’s a bit heavy.” And in all the talk about girls and models and sex, Blunt admits that he doesn’t like to go home alone.
When I finished the article, I was sadly struck by the possibility that this guy’s heart has been broken by Beautiful. He’s spending his life, pouring it out, because her absence has ripped a hole in his heart and nothing can seem to repair it. He can’t eat. He can’t sleep. He numbs himself all the night long and surrounds himself with people all day. He still loves Beautiful! My heart breaks for him. I like him. And I have a deeper appreciation for his music now. But I don’t know, maybe I’m exposing more of my own romanticism. Ya. That’s probably it. Never mind.
This is a painting I did recently titled “Separated Friends“, available in my eBay store.
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A friend of mine, in our community, is suffering from the side-effects of the radical treatment he’s receiving for his very aggressive lukemia. I was with him and his family last night. Then today, I took another member of our community for an appointment that she couldn’t drive home from herself. I’m tired and feeling sad about all the illness and struggles that I’m surrounded with. So this is all I have to say today. Here’s something beautiful to look at, a fine-art photograph by my friend Howard Nowlan.
Yesterday, instead of me speaking (since I’m taking a break from it for a while), we invited anybody to read something they’d written. For about an hour several people got up front and read what they’d written. Everyone was astounded. The quality of writing was amazing. There was poetry, journal entries, song lyrics, short stories, proverbs, and things that just can’t be categorized. The youngest to read was my daughter Casile, 15 years old, and the oldest was Joyce, in her 70s. There were people up there who are normally quite vocal and play a pretty visible and audible role in the life of the community. They weren’t surprises. But there were others who never make a peep and hide in the shadows who got up and read some of the most amazing stuff. We were shocked!
This is what I think: when you do something that doesn’t follow the norm, like reading personal journal entries in a religious setting, then something happens. It’s like all of a sudden things are being said that don’t sound religious, don’t have religious overtones and aren’t even at all moralizing. Some of the poetry that was read had to do with physical abuse of a child. Another of the beating of a woman. Some had to do with our blatant disinterest in Darfur. Some had to do with love. One had to do with the death of a sister. One had to do with wanting to die. One had to do with atheism and doubting, questioning and abandoning a god that never seemed to exist to begin with. One had to do with a tubal pregnancy and grieving something that was never even seen. One had to do with wanting to stop this race and just enjoy the view from here. One was a friend’s tribute to another woman in our congregation just diagnosed with Altzeimers. One had to do with depression. And I can fairly say that although they didn’t contain religious vocabulary for the most part, they were very religious in the sense that they testified to something larger than themselves. We all left amazed, encouraged and filled with a sense of awe. Everyone left feeling more creative or the desire to be.
Creativity cannot and should not be edited or controlled or directed. I don’t think most of the people who read thought, when they were writing, “What would God want me to write?” They just wrote what was heavy on their hearts at the time. As a result, it was free, risky and incisive. But because of that it did something. It crossed boundaries. It walked through walls. It altered our reality. We left changed.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Jorgen Klausen.
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Beauty. Recognize and appreciate the beauty. Respect it. I had a few people mention the fine-art photograph I had on my post yesterday, Living Without A Goal. This piece of art is beautiful. The comments people gave are thoughtful and beautiful in their own right. But it goes further than flesh and form. When someone comes into our community, do we see them as they are, sure… with all their struggles and weaknesses… but what about their own beauty. Each one is beautiful. Is each one seen? Is each one respected?
When beauty is recognized and appreciated, then our urges to change it become redundant. With the photo yesterday, if you really see it and appreciate it, how would you want to change her, or change Howard’s photograph? When you see a beautiful flower, how would you want to manipulate it into anything else other than what it already is? I am surrounded by people who have been under pressure to change. I have been under pressure to change, to conform to someone else’s expectations, to their vision they have of me. What that does is tell the person that in fact they aren’t beautiful at all but ugly. Appreciate and respect the beauty in other people. But first you have to see it. So we try to create an environment where people can freely blossom in the good soil of love and respect.
The fine art photograph is the creation of my friend Jorgen Klausen.
Contributions to nakedpastor are greatly appreciated.
David Hayward is a pastor artistically stripping to the essential.
